I was at OCEAN’s TechCon26 conference earlier this month, and I was able to enroll a few more people into the RPGPGM.COM-unity. You can see who these people are here.
If you see me at an IBM i event feel free to introduce yourself to me, ask for your own RPGPGM.COM-unity ribbon, and you will become part of this community. All I ask in return is a photograph of you with it.
If you would like to learn more about the RPGPGM.COM-unity click here.
Before I start describing how to use this new SQL Table Function, I need to explain what CVE are.
Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures, CVE, are standardized, publicly identified cybersecurity flaws in software or firmware. When IBM, or a researcher, find a flaw in IBM i, or related software, it is given a unique id. These ids are cataloged globally by the MITRE Corporation, and published with their severity and impacts.
You can learn more about CVE on IBM's "What is CVE?" page.
I cannot find a CL command that allows me to view CVE details. I would have to search for a particular CVE using the IBM Product Security Central page.
With the latest Technology Refreshes, IBM i 7.6 TR2 and 7.5 TR8, is a new SQL Table Function that allows me view, and search, all of CVE from my IBM i partition.
The CVE_INFO Table Function is found in the library SYSTOOL, it has one parameter the IBM i release number. I went through and checked for each release to find that V5R3 is the earliest there are results for:
The PTFs for the Technology Refreshes, IBM i 7.6 TR2 and 7.5 TR8, announced two weeks ago are released today.
When you ask your Sys Admin to download and apply the PTFs don't forget to tell them that they need to download the latest PTFs for Database (Db2) and RPG too.
I am looking forward to "playing" with all the new and enhanced features added, and will be writing about them here, on RPGPGM.COM.
When I published my article about Program to alert when jobs' CPU percentage becomes too high someone messaged me asking could I think of something that would do the same when the total CPU exceeded a certain percentage. The answer is, of course, "Yes".
Before I create a program we need to consider the whether the partition that the program will be run on is "capped" or "uncapped". What does that mean?
When a partition is capped it cannot use more than its allocated processing units, in other words it can never exceed 100% CPU usage.
While an uncapped partition has its base entitlement of the processing units, but can borrow unused processing power from the other partitions if available. This means that its CPU usage can exceed 100% of the partition's resources.
This means that 90% CPU utilization could be more concerning on a capped than an uncapped. Keep this in mind when you look at my example program.
I always use ACS's Run SQL Scripts, RSS, to develop the SQL statements I will be including in a RPG program. I can get the elapsed CPU percentage from the SYSTEM_STATUS SQL table function:
Along with the announcement of the latest Technology Refreshes came another announcement for the smallest of the IBM Power11 servers, S1112.
I am not a hardware geek, more of a software one, but having read the announcement document I think it is something worth reporting upon.
S1112 is in the P05 software tier that can run IBM i AIX, Linux, or hybrid workloads on one server.
It comes in two configuations:
The deferred first Technology Refreshes of 2026 PTFs, IBM i 7.6 TR2 and 7.5 TR8, have been announced.
The first thing I do when any new TR announcement is made is to check out what enhancements have been made to Db2 for i (SQL) and RPG. Do note that there are a number of changes and additions made to IBM i 7.6 that have not been made to 7.5.
The SQL that have caught my eye are:
A new version of IBM's "IBM i on Power – Performance FAQ" was published at the beginning of this month, and is available for download.
The guide provides us with tips on how to measure, and improve, the performance of your IBM Power server, IBM i partitions, Db2 database, and programs that run within it.
You will find the document here.
I always download it and read the passages I feel are relevant to my situation. I recommend you do the same.
IBM made an announcement yesterday, Thursday July 9, with more information about the new IBM Bob Premium Package for i. This includes some more information about the additions to it.
I am not going to repeat what is says. Just provide you with the link to it here.
There are many different web sites that offer information that would be useful to consume in IBM i. I have seen several examples of doing this, and I thought I would show my example, which I think, shows how simple it can be.
In my example I want to retrieve the share prices for the three biggest technology companies in the city I live in:
I was sent a copy of a job log from weeks ago, and had been asked to identify which parts of the job had run the longest. Fortunately, the spool file of the job log was still available so I could do some SQL magic to extract useful information from it. The first thing I want to do is to determine is how long each program or command took. I can extract the timestamp from the spool file, but I need to be able to retrieve the timestamp for the previous entry too. How can I retrieve that information for the previous entry?
After a bit of searching I found a SQL function that would allow me to do this. Rather than go straight into showing what I did with the joblog spool file, I am going to start with a simpler example. I have a DDL table, TESTTABLE, that has a decimal column, TEST_NUMBER, and nine rows of data. I can show the data using the following SQL statement:
01 SELECT TEST_NUMBER 02 FROM TESTTABLE |
Which returns:
Migrate While Active, MWA, is one of the more exciting features recently introduced for IBM Power hardware and the IBM i operating system. It is tool that helps me to move IBM i workloads to new servers, data centers, or the cloud with near-zero downtime.
Basically MWA is performed in three steps:
This results in almost no interruption in service.
Today the first significant update for IBM Bob, the AI-development tool for IBM i has been released.
It is called IBM Bob Premium Package for i
You can read the announcement, that gives you all the details on the new features, here.
There is also an Overview page, that includes the link to download it, here.
You do have to be using IBM Bob 2.0.0 to use IBM Bob Premium Package for i.
After the first paragraph in the Overview document is a button to "Copy Markdown". I strongly recommend you do. I clicked the button and then pasted what was copied into Notepad. The markdown contains all kinds of useful information to successfully install the new version.
Within markdown are some paths to further documentation. As paths do not include the domain I have for your convenience done so below: